Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills clashed with President Donald Trump at a White Home occasion Friday over her state’s opposition to his govt order searching for to bar transgender scholar athletes from enjoying on ladies’ sports activities groups.
Whereas the president was addressing a bipartisan group of governors, he stopped to single out Mills. “Is Maine right here?” Trump requested, “the governor of Maine?” “Yeah,” she responded from throughout the room. “I’m right here.”
Trump had been rambling about “males enjoying in ladies’s sports activities” and inaccurately retelling the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who acquired anti-trans hate for competing within the ladies’s cohort on the Paris Olympics, regardless that she herself will not be transgender or intersex.
“Are you not going to adjust to it,” Trump requested Mills, referring to his govt order. “I’m complying with the state and federal legal guidelines,” she responded shortly. “Properly I’m, we’re the federal legislation,” Trump mentioned earlier than threatening to withhold Maine’s federal funding if Mills and different leaders in her state didn’t comply.
In early February, the Maine Principals’ Affiliation, the physique that governs faculty sports activities within the state, announced it might proceed to permit transgender feminine athletes to compete, saying that Trump’s govt order conflicts with the Maine Human Rights Act.
“See you in courtroom,” Mills instructed Trump in a rare act of public defiance to the president’s face by Democratic lawmakers. “Good, I’ll see you in courtroom,” he responded. “I look ahead to that. That ought to be an actual straightforward one. And revel in your life after governor as a result of I don’t assume you’ll be in elected politics.”
Whereas transient, the alternate has garnered nationwide consideration because the Democratic Social gathering tries to determine how to reply to the Trump administration’s persistent upending of long-held federal requirements.
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Trump’s govt order, which notes a number of instances within the textual content that it’ll “defend” ladies, used Title IX to justify excluding transgender athletes from enjoying on the sports activities crew that matches their gender identification (although transgender boys and males are notably absent from the language). It is a a lot totally different interpretation from former president Joe Biden’s administration. In 2024, Biden finalized new Title IX guidelines barring colleges from discriminating towards transgender college students.
Based on the Nationwide Collegiate Athletic Affiliation President Charlie Baker, who testified in entrance of a Senate panel in December, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes that he’s conscious of who at the moment compete in faculty sports activities and, nationally, simply around 1 percent of adults establish as transgender, based on the Williams Institute at UCLA Faculty of Regulation—a actuality that highlights the outsized fixation from the Trump administration.
